Celebrating Life Human being like to celebrate. We celebrate births and deaths and everything in between. The biggest ones tend to be around marriage, holidays and the ubiquitous birthday celebrations. Many of us have occasionally grown weary of some of the celebrations. In a large work team, celebrating every person’s birthday and special events could take up an inordinate amount of time and resources so they are either foregone or done in bulk every month…
Losing a Friend Friends drift into and out of our lives all the time. I, in particular, am very aware of this phenomenon since I spent most of my early life moving from one locale to another as a trailing child to a globetrotting mother. My early years were spent in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica with an interregnum in such different places as Santa Monica and Ithaca. That more or less took…
Thanksgiving I have written many times about the importance of giving thanks for all we are fortunate enough to have in our lives. This is not a trivial thought or gesture, but rather a core belief in the importance of humility and the recognition that we all must be thankful for all the good things we have in our lives and recognize that while we can contribute to their existence, we are all, for the…
The Layers of Life Life goes on around us at all times whether we are paying attention or not. It is very hard to say how engaged we should be with every aspect of it at any given moment. I use the differences at the moment between my friend Mike and myself as an example. It is 8am and I am listening to Jose Diaz-Balart on MSNC while I am writing this story. When I…
Cashing the Check For my many years in senior management on Wall Street, friends would regularly tell me that I was too nice for Wall Street. That was a polite way of saying that I was a pussy and refused to treat people harshly. Don’t get me wrong, I have had to downstaff thousands of people over the years, but I also always gave people the benefit of the doubt and tried never to take…
Free Will This morning I read an interesting article about Professor Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University. He is a professor of biology and neurology who is an atheist who was raised as an Orthodox Jew in the heart of Brooklyn. He has spent his career studying the behavior of both primates and humans and has come to a rather bold conclusion. He believes there is ample evidence to prove that when it comes to man’s…
Getting Crazier We all know that American politics has been pretty crazy for about eight years now. Yes, that coincides with Donald Trump coming onto the scene of the American political landscape in a serious (I have a really hard time using that word to describe anything Donald Trump does) way. It does strike me that we are in the beginning of the eventual end to that reign of terror now that we are seeing…
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod In 1889, poet Eugene Field, “the poet of childhood” and a man of letters wrote the poem, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Field was from a somewhat storied family in Missouri as his father, an attorney, famously represented Dred Scott in his failed attempt to litigate for his and his immediate family’s freedom in 1857. This led to the infamous Dred Scott Decision wherein the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that he was…
The Majesty of Place There is a line from America the Beautiful that we all know that goes “For purple mountains majesties…”. We all know the song written by Katherine Lee Bates in 1895 (originally called Pikes Peak). She was an English professor at Wellesley College and she wrote the song while taking a cross-country trip to Colorado. When she looked out at the wonders she could see from Pikes Peak, the words flowed into…